


What Wasn't There Before

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [45]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avenger Loki (Marvel), Avenger Reader (Marvel), Enemies to Friends, F/M, Hate to Love, Missions Gone Wrong, Misunderstandings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:54:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24101692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: You're pretty sure that Loki hates you. He's never given you any indication otherwise, anyway, so that's probably the safest assumption. But then, when you're thrown together on a mission, something changes.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [45]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 8
Kudos: 298





	What Wasn't There Before

Loki didn’t like you. In fact, you were pretty sure that he out-and-out hated you. 

It wasn’t really anything specific, just a lot of little things which all added up into a coldness that seemed to go beyond his usual aloofness. You were a little unnerved when he’d come to live in the Tower, of course—you’d lived through the Battle of New York. His face, hollow and tortured, had dominated your nightmares for months after all that. It would have been so easy to let yourself look at him the way Natasha did, and Clint, and Tony, with that suspicious edge that let him know they hadn’t forgotten what he’d tried to do. You could have tried to avoid him. Hell, he spent most of his time locked away, so it wouldn’t even have been all that difficult to avoid him. But, even as some small part of you shrunk away with fear, you wouldn’t allow yourself to show it. 

He wouldn’t have a place in the Tower if there wasn’t some reasonable assurance that he was not a danger. Your own overdeveloped sense of empathy made your stomach turn when you saw your teammates—your friends—give him those cold, wary looks. Imagine if they looked at you like that. Of course, you knew Loki was not as soft as you were, so it was hard to imagine that he could be hurt by their treatment, but at the very least, it had to be annoying, right? 

You never forced your presence on him. You didn’t buddy up to him and seek to learn every last detail about his entire life. But if he was somewhere you wanted to be, you did everything in your power not to freeze in place as soon as you noticed him, or else turn and go somewhere else. That was _something_ , at least. You wanted to show him that at least one person (other than his brother) knew that he lived here and wasn’t aching to throw him in prison or something. For however much that might have mattered to him.

He didn’t look at you much. That was fine, honestly—you knew you weren’t much to look at, anyway. But sometimes, like when you wandered into the living room while he’d already staked out a claim on one of the easy chairs, he’d look up and his eyes would just go cold. Or, on the rare occasion that you couldn’t fall asleep and went walking through the Tower just to have a distraction from your pillow’s reminder of your own failure, sometimes you’d stumble across him in the hallways or the kitchen and he would immediately turn away from you and disappear. 

What really got you, though, was dinner. When the whole team ate together, and chatted and laughed with one another, you started to notice the way he’d grit his teeth when you spoke. He pretty much always just glared down at his plate, but it was hard to miss the way his fingers would tighten around his fork or his knife when you chimed in with one of your stupid jokes or something. 

So maybe, for a while, you decided to try to tone yourself down a little. It was clear that there was something about you that made him even more uneasy than the teammates who wanted him dead. You made an effort to avoid the common areas so that, if he was already there, you didn’t make him uncomfortable with your presence. You couldn’t skip every single dinner with the team, but when you did join them, you kept as quiet as you could without drawing anyone’s attention. Sure enough, Loki stopped being quite so tense. That made you feel a little better, even if his reaction to you did hurt your feelings a little. 

But fine. You were already more than comfortable here in the Tower and here on the team. Loki was the one you were worried about, and he had every right to try to be just as comfortable here. You kept your distance.

Until you were sent on an assignment together. That was strange in itself: Loki was rarely set anywhere without his brother, as though Thor needed to be nearby to keep him in line or something. You tried to get out of it, tried to switch with someone else on the team, but you were stuck. This assignment required stealth and finesse. Natasha was already busy halfway around the world and no one else was the right fit. You had wanted, very badly, to whine at your handler and tell her that Loki couldn’t stand you and wouldn’t want to work with you, but you managed to hold that back. She didn’t care. She just wanted results.

So the two of you got onto the jet. You tried to avoid looking at Loki without making it obvious that you were trying to avoid it, and you were so distracted by that that you couldn’t stop the mumbled apology from falling from your lips as you settled into your seats. It wasn’t often that you felt the need to apologize for your very existence, at least not anymore. But something about Loki just did that to you. As you shot off through the air, on your way to some tiny city near the Russian border, your mind did acrobatics trying to find a way to make yourself feel better. It wasn’t your fault that he was forced into such close quarters with you. And even if it was, if you weren’t the one here with him, it would have been someone else. Statistically, that ‘someone else’ would have been someone who didn’t care about not being obvious about their discomfort or about not wanting him on their team. Every now and then, you started to speak, to make stupid small talk to try to remind him that you didn’t hate his guts, but every single idea you had felt hideously dumb and pointless. Finally, you gave up entirely, and instead leaned your head backwards to try to nap your way through this flight.

When you landed, you both got to work without a word. You’d never worked with him like this before, but he knew what he was doing. Neither of you actually needed to speak much at all. If you needed something while setting up, you barely even had to look up to see that he was already holding it out to you. Something in your consciousness did the same, holding out bits of equipment to him and helping him finish his work without any prompting. It was easy to feel normal while doing tasks like these. It didn’t matter if, in your personal time, Loki didn’t like you, because when you were working, you could get along just fine. You were good at compartmentalizing like that, and you weren’t overly surprised to see that Loki was, too.

Things went off without a hitch, for a while. You laid low, surveilled, gathered intel. This wasn’t intended to be a physical mission. If it was, they definitely would have waited for Natasha to get back. You couldn’t shake your wish that they had. He was just as uncomfortable in the tiny room that served as your base as he was in the Tower. Maybe even more so, since he couldn’t escape. It was hard to ignore your instincts, which by now had become simply “leave him alone, don’t push yourself on him” but you were working. You had to. When the two of you spoke, it was always short, almost harsh words. At least for you, the sharpness in your tone had more to do with the stress of the assignment than anything else. You tried to tell yourself that it was probably the same for him, even though your soft childish heart kept wishing he had anyone else for a partner.

Things got tense. On one of your (very few) ventures out of your hidey-hole, you crossed paths with one of the men you were keeping tabs on. He’d looked you up and down with an air of suspicion, sharklike eyes calculating and assessing as though trying to decide whether you were a threat. You’d done your very best to throw him off, twirling a lock of your hair around your finger as you blathered mindlessly into your phone. Nothing to see here, Big Bad, your mind kept repeating. Just a clueless little airhead talking to her boyfriend. Through your earpiece, Loki had been absolutely confounded at the change in your behavior and kept trying to interrupt to ask you _what the fuck_ , until he realized what you were doing. Then he fell silent again.

After entirely too many heart-stopping minutes, the guy apparently decided that you were nothing. It had taken every scrap of self-control to keep from sighing with relief when he turned his back on you, but you managed. And you didn’t let yourself run away, either. You forced yourself to stay there a little while longer, feigning nonchalance, until Loki finally ordered you to get back.

When you got what you’d come for, and started breaking everything down and packing it back away again, you were mostly relieved. When you got home, you could go back to keeping away from Loki the way you’d done before. He hadn’t relaxed much at all in the last few days, hadn’t slowly become more accustomed to you. If anything, he seemed even more tense now than he had at the start. The few times you’d tried to reach out, tried to make some silly joke or make an observation, you were always met with a stony silence. But it was fine. You did _not_ need everyone to like you. That was stupid and ridiculous. You wanted to stop bothering, but you couldn’t help it. 

The Big Bad showed up again just as you were about to make your way to the jet. He’d appeared as if from the shadows, almost smirking at you. Why did they always smirk? You’d headed out first, hoping to give Loki a few precious moments of alone time, but it looked like that had been a mistake. You fought. God, did you fight. This was literally one of the things you’d been trained for, but no matter how you tried to get out of his grip, he was like iron. He even seemed amused, somehow, laughing each time you landed a blow that should have stunned him. He’d pulled you into an alley beside the building, closed thick fingers around your throat until your vision went blurry, and repeated your “boyfriend’s” name at you in a mocking tone. A blade glinted in his hand.

Dizzily, you tried not to laugh back at him. Loki carried the majority of your intel. You just had a lot of hardware right now. From the man’s monologue, it seemed pretty clear that he had no idea you weren’t alone. He could kill you if he wanted, fine, but it wouldn’t help him much at all. Still, he threatened you with the blade, drew it along your skin like the mere touch of metal was supposed to make you crumple. Maybe if you were really that clueless little airhead, it might have. He seemed to grow frustrated, started sticking you with the knife like that was going to get you to give up your information. They were flesh wounds, mostly, nothing seriously dangerous. But then he sank it into your stomach in a fit of rage. That finally made a sick chill steal through you. Alright, that could be dangerous. You weren’t still wearing your earpiece; you had no way of knowing if Loki was safe and gone. You continued to fight back, and even managed to land a few good blows on his face before he twisted your arms up painfully behind you. At least he wasn’t still stabbing you.

Loki’s voice, icy and fearsome, sounded from the end of the alley. The man crushed both of your wrists into one hand and used the other to press the knife against your throat. You hated the way your hearing started to go out, but what else could you expect? They argued. He tried to use you to bargain with Loki for whatever information you’d come for. _That_ made you laugh a little. In an entirely different situation, you might have spoken up to tell him how stupid and pointless that was, but you were mostly focused on trying _not_ to focus on the searing pain in your belly. 

What happened next was a bit of a blur. It was like the alley was filled with a dozen of Loki’s clones, moving in and out of your line of sight. They distracted the man, and Loki knocked him to the ground. Dizzily, you found yourself irritated that Loki could manage that when you hadn’t made a dent in him. He...took care of things, and then stooped over you. You couldn’t focus on him enough to really make out what he was saying, but you did hear yourself just repeating apologies over and over again. Finally he pulled you to your feet, took off his jacket to wrap it around you (likely to hide the blood), scooped your materials up into his other arm, and led you back to the jet. 

The flight back was every bit as disjointed and fuzzy as you’d expect. Loki did get you to lie down, did press painfully against your wound to stem the flow of your blood, and he wouldn’t let go no matter how many times you tried to push him away and tell him that you were fine. Because you _were_ fine, weren’t you? Just...cold? You weren’t really in any state of mind to file new memories away, but what stuck with you through everything was that Loki’s face was not hard and icy when he looked down at you. Maybe your vision was going or something, but he almost looked worried.

At some point, things went black. 

When you woke up again, you knew you weren’t still on the jet. There was an obnoxious beeping coming from something that was far too close to your head. When you groaned and reached out to try to push it away, your arm barely moved. God, was it always that heavy? With great effort, you forced your eyes open. You were in a hospital bed. Or perhaps not a hospital bed, but a hospital-type bed in Tony’s infirmary. The lights were dim, which made you think that maybe it was night?

Loki sat in a chair beside your bed. From his posture, the position of his shoulders, he looked like he was sitting in a throne. You started to call him a king before you caught yourself and literally bit down on your tongue. Better not.

He looked up and sat forward as soon as he realized you were looking at him. Gone was that impassive, imperious glare he so often wore in your presence, replaced instead by...sheer relief. Maybe you wanted the glare back, though, because the softness in his face unnerved you. 

“You’re awake. It took you long enough.” It was like he was trying to be his old self with you, but you couldn’t focus on anything but his face. 

“You should have left me. You had the case.” You said the words, but even you could tell that you weren’t sure if you meant them. It was the procedure, in any case. He had the important stuff. He was the priority for getting out of there. His brow furrowed, not quite in anger. It was more like...confusion. 

“The case was on the jet. You weren’t. So I went looking for you. I don’t leave soldiers behind.” He said it like it was a point of pride. Probably it was. “Anyway, if I’d realized what you were taking, there was no way I would have let you leave first. What were you thinking?”

You laughed, and were immediately punished for it by the shock of sharp pain in your abdomen. After a few moments of careful, deep breaths, it passed enough for you to speak. “I was thinking that you’re a god with magic powers. It was safer with you than with me. Obviously.”

He didn’t have an argument for that, and you were honestly rather grateful. All this lying-here-doing-nothing-for-a-few-minutes was already taking its toll on you. Grimly, he sat back in the chair, resting against the back of it so that he no longer looked quite so regal. Instead, he looked exhausted. Your heart went out to him.

“I’m not a god. I’m just not mortal.” He kept his eyes fixed somewhere on the blankets that covered you. “You lost more blood than I thought a mortal could stand to lose.”

That might explain your weakness, then. You gave up the fight against your heavy eyelids, but nodded at him so he’d know you heard him. Did I get any on you?” You felt your lips curl up in response to your own attempt at humor, but, as usual, he didn’t seem to like it.

“It’s not funny.” His voice was sharp and disapproving, but you could only smile wider. Things were getting back to normal. “Stop that.” You felt the blankets move a little, and then he was dragging your hand off the bed, caught between the both of his. That...wasn’t normal. He squeezed your hand a little too tightly, which made you open your eyes so you could look at him. He seemed so small, so hunched and nervous. When he saw you looking at him again, he made no effort to change that. The way he was looking at you made you wonder if you’d been misinterpreting his behavior all this time. “You’re the only one here who doesn’t want me dead. Even if you don’t really like me, I hate the thought of losing you.”

That made you laugh again and even as you tried to make yourself breathe through the pain, you could imagine the way things were reshuffling in your brain. Different things were falling into different places, and new ideas were coming to light. “I _like_ you,” you finally managed to rasp out at him. Damn, you had a long recovery ahead of you. “But I always get the sense that _you_ don’t like me.”

“You’re fine,” Loki said, but the way he was still gripping your hand seemed to suggest something otherwise. You forced yourself not to smile at him. You’d take ‘you’re fine’, then, for now. You could work with ‘you’re fine’, if he kept looking at you like that.

You let your head fall back against the pillows but struggled to keep your eyes open so you could meet his gaze. With as straight a face as you could manage, you squeezed his hand back and said “You’re fine, too.”

He didn’t leave your side until you were well enough to go back to your own room and, even then, you discovered that you were both a little unwilling to be apart. He started allowing himself to laugh at your jokes. 

A warmth began to grow between you.


End file.
